Leadership

Issue: West Palm Is Dealing With Crises On Several Significant Fronts.

October 5, 2007

These are not banner days for West Palm Beach.

First, a ghastly gang rape shined a national spotlight on the city's undeniable crime problem. Then city leaders embarrassed themselves by picking on the least fortunate and banning feeding the homeless downtown.

Days later, a catastrophic breakdown in the city's most basic responsibility - providing safe drinking water - underscored the decades-long neglect of its infrastructure system. Worse than the fact that residents and businesses suffered through the seventh straight day Thursday under a protracted and disruptive boil-water order, officials still have no clue how fecal coliform so wholly contaminated the drinking supply, or when the order would be lifted.

It gets worse. Now comes word that an appellate court ruling has put a crucial, costly downtown development project in jeopardy, halfway through construction. Saying the controversial City Center City Hall and library project should have gone to voters for a referendum, the ruling casts doubt over the future of the $154 million endeavor.

These are crises that demand strong leadership to navigate through, especially if West Palm Beach ever hopes to be the top-notch cosmopolitan destination it strives to be.

Though they shoulder some, even much, of the responsibility for the city's current predicament, it's not fair to lay all the blame at the feet of Mayor Lois Frankel, or the current City Commission. Violent crime doesn't run amok in a city's poorest neighborhoods overnight, and the city's failure to properly maintain its aging water system is well-known and goes back several administrations. As for the City Center project, it had been on the books long before a disgruntled citizen's group tried to derail it through a referendum, so fighting a disingenuous and overly vague ballot question was hardly irresponsible.

But it is absolutely up to the city's current leadership to accept its role in the mess and pull West Palm out of this gutter of ignominy. Times of crisis, after all, expose the fiber of a leader, and these will test Frankel's ability to guide West Palm to the prosperity and respectability she envisions for her city.

How she handles the water crisis and the City Center question will prove especially telling. She must publicly dedicate herself to finding out what happened to bring the city's drinking delivery system to its knees, treat it as more than an inconvenience and, whatever the answer to how the water got contaminated, pledge to wholly upgrade a deteriorating system that has long delivered smelly, unappetizing water to the kitchen sink.

City Center, too, offers Frankel an opportunity to do what she refused to do before: meet the project's critics halfway and compromise on key elements of the complex, especially by replacing the photo center with a more dynamic tenant and add revenue-generating retail components to the street-front.

Make no mistake about it. West Palm is ailing, and city leaders, namely Frankel, are the only ones who hold the cure.

BOTTOM LINE: City leaders must step up and lead West Palm out of these times of crisis.